So close, and yet so far... (03/14/99)

So close, and yet so far...

SOLONTSI, Ukraine - Although brother and sister have lived in the same village all their lives, Maria Ivan and her brother, Arpad, have been able to hug each other only twice in the past 53 years. As a result of a post-World War II treaty, a barbed wire fence marking borders has divided them, reported the Associated Press in a recent story.

The bureaucratic hassle required to literally cross the street proves too difficult for 85-year-old Mrs. Ivan to visit her bed-ridden brother. In order to cross the street, which is the border, one must purchase a passport, then travel and wait all day at a border crossing 30 miles away in order to return to the Slovak part of the village that Mrs. Ivan views though the chain links only yards away in Ukraine.

Solontsi is found 12 miles north of where the Ukrainian, Slovak and Hungarian borders meet. Today, half of the 1,100 people inhabiting the village live on the Ukrainian side, while the other half live in Velke Slemence, Slovakia. Most of the village inhabitants are ethnic Hungarians.

The village was named Szelmenc and belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Mrs. Ivan was born in 1913. After World War I the village became the property of Czecho-Slovakia, only to land in Hungary's hands in 1938. Following World War II a barbed-wire fence was erected to divide Maria's half of the village in the Soviet Union from the other half belonging to Czecho-Slovakia.

When Ukraine gained its independence, Solontsi became a part of Ukraine, and since five years ago, when Czecho-Slovakia divided, Velke Slemence has been a part of Slovakia.

When the fence was initially raised, villagers were allowed to cross borders freely to visit family members, attend church and tend to crops. One day those rights were forbidden and strict border regulations were enforced. Many of the people who were on the wrong side that day have never been reunited with their families. A little girl who was sick with the flu was resting at her grandmother's house on the Slovak side while her mother worked in the fields in Ukraine that day. She was never permitted to return to her parents.

When Mrs. Ivan's mother died on the Slovak side, she was denied a permit to attend the funeral. She stood at the fence and watched her loved ones mourn 200 yards away at the cemetery.

Twice during the Gorbachev era a crossing was opened, but since Ukraine's independence border guards have been stricter than ever, even forbidding conversations across the fence in order "to implement earlier agreements by politicians," said Sehiy Astakhov, a border guard spokesman in Kyiv.

For many of the villagers, the border fences have become a way of life. The division is most painful for the families that have been forcefully separated. Even today, when people on the Slovak side send letters to Solontsi, most of their letters are returned, stamped "address unknown."

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